How it works

Springhills Fish is a second-generation family business run by siblings Arlen and RJ Taylor. Our parents Jim and Lynette Taylor opened our first fish farm in 1995, and over the years we’ve expanded to several farm sites and a processing facility in Grey County. We raise most of the fish ourselves, and also work with other local businesses to share even more tasty and sustainable fish!

• Rainbow Trout (also called steelhead trout) — All Springhills trout are ethically raised on our small-scale family farms. Their fresh taste comes from plenty of fresh water, low densities, sustainable diets and other humane growing methods.
• Arctic char — Our Arctic char are raised at our cold-water farm near Durham. All our fish is certified sustainable and fully traceable from fark to fork!
• Coho salmon — These are the newest members to the Springhills family, and we raise them in small batches at our farm in Hanover.
• Pickerel (also called walleye) — All Springhills pickerel is wild-caught by independently owned fishermen and women in Lake Erie. It comes from a fishery that is internationally recognized as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council.

At Springhills, we try our hardest to make sure our fish are happy and healthy every day of their lives.

We keep them at low densities, so they have lots of room. They get plenty of fresh water, and we obsess about water quality throughout the farms. We use special diets so they have the protein, vitamins and minerals to thrive. And we even use extras like water sprayers that act as enrichment actvities and break the water surface so they aren’t stressed (you’ll see them hanging out there on hot summer days!)

Fish may not show emotions like your dog does, but they’re always communicating how they’re feeling by how they swim, how they school, how they eat, and how they treat each other in the tank. Every member of the extended Springhills family are always watching them and adjusting things so they’re as happy as can be before they’re ready for your dinner plate!

All Springhills fish are good for you, and good for the planet. All our offerings are recommended by Ocean Wise for sustainability. We follow strict guidelines on how humanely we care for our fish, how clean their water is, and the quality and ingredients in their food.

Springhills trout, salmon and char are eco-certified by Best Aquaculture Practices, which involves regular on-site audits to ensure we’re acting in the best interest of our fish, the environment, our staff and our community.

Springhills pickerel comes from a wild fishery that’s internationally recognized for sustainability and food safety by the Marine Stewardship Council.

One of the things we’re most proud of at Springhills is that our sites are certified sustainable by the Best Aquaculture Practices program, or what we call BAP.

BAP is one of the international gold standards for environmentalism on fish farms. It means you can have confidence that we’re farming in the best interest of the planet, our fish, our staff and our community.

Every December, a BAP auditor spends three days at our farms. First they check all of our records, including water sampling, fish health, feeding and treatments, tank cleaning, staff training, and more.

Then they go inspect every site and take their own samples. They end by interviewing and quizzing our staff.

The auditor then gives us “non-conformances” if we don’t meet requirements — but we’ve gotten none in the last two years!

It took us four years to prepare for our first BAP audit several years ago. The program is voluntary and much stricter than our government requirements, but we do it to show you that we hold ourselves to the highest international standard for sustainability.

Part of being BAP certified also means that we can only use special fish feed from BAP-certified mills, which is just another reason Springhills fish are good for you, and good for the planet!

We’re pretty obsessed with what we feed our fish at Springhills so that they’re happy, grow well and taste so good. Before our father started our first farm, we worked with fish farmers across Ontario to formulate and sell innovative fish feeds!

Fish like trout and salmon are top-level predators in the wild, which means they need plenty of protein and don’t thrive on ingredients like corn and soy like most other farmed animals. We feed a diet heavy on protein, which mostly comes from fish meal and fish oil. Then we round it out with a finely tuned blend of carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.

Sometimes fishmeal and fish oil can get a bad rap because of their environmental impact. We work closely with local feed mills to ensure our ingredients are eco-friendly, and that includes working in as much reclaimed trimmings as possible. We hold an international sustainability certification called Best Aquaculture Practices that gives us rules on where the feed ingredients come from and their sustainability.

Fun fact: A salmon in the wild needs to eat approximately 7 kilograms of wild fish to grow one kilogram of meat. Thanks to decades of feed science, a farmed trout or salmon only needs to eat about 0.5 kilograms of fish to grow one kilogram of meat, and often we source that fish from reclaimed sources!

Here’s a two-minute video of us explaining our feed.

We have no idea where the misconception comes from.

The research agrees that trout, salmon and char are packed with protein and healthy omega fats, whether they’re wild or farmed.

But we wanted to find out for ourselves, so we reached out to the Guelph Food Innovation Centre at the University of Guelph to analyze our rainbow trout and Arctic char.

And they showed that Springhills fish are overloaded with all the things that make fish good for you.

In a typical serving of Springhills trout (somewhere around 5oz), our analyses shows you get more than 1,000mg of omega-3 fatty acids. The Arctic char are only slightly less. (For context, Health Canada recommends at least 300 – 450 mg a day.)

So wild, farmed, whatever. If you’re eating local fish that’s eco-certified, you’re making a good decision for you and a good decision for the planet!

See our Ingredients and Nutritional Information page for all this information.

The short answer is no. We never use hormones on the farm, and we raise our fish free of antibiotics and to the organic standard.

But because you’re asking the farmers, we will give you the long answer!

We occasionally use antibiotics, but only when it’s absolutely necessary for keeping the fish healthy. It’s part of our standards for humane raising them.

If we use antibiotics, it’s only when the fish are very young because they’re immune systems aren’t strong enough. It’s only a last resort when they’re sick and our other tricks aren’t working to get them better.

We have not medicated a fish over 3 months old (25 grams) for at least 5 years — to contextualize that, you eat a fish when it’s 2 years old and 50 times bigger at 1,000 – 1,500 grams.

The reason that we can keep our Ocean Wise Recommendation is because we have such low uses of antibiotics in Ontario, and the same goes for our certification from the Global Aquaculture Alliance. The low antibiotic use is one of the defining things they noted on their last audit.

Here’s a strange fact: Even if a fish is deemed “organic”, it may very well have the same medical treatments when they are young. The organic standard focuses on the last 90% of the fish’s growth because (a) sometimes using antibiotics on the younger fish is a welfare issue, as in you wouldn’t want to leave them sick if they need help, and (b) any tiny bit of residue has been out of the fish for two years before you eat it!